The Butterfly Mosque (27 page)

I grinned. “They're the lucky ones,” I said. “They'll have energy at the wedding tomorrow. We'll all be asleep in our chairs.”

She laughed and patted my hand. “You miss Omar, of course,” she said with a wicked smile. “And he misses you. You're still a bride and groom.”

“It's only for one evening,” I protested, blushing. “We'll survive.”

“He dies in her!” said one of the other aunts, carrying a plate of food. “It's so romantic.” In colloquial Egyptian, to
die in someone is to love her so intensely that the feeling consumes you.

“Of course he does,” said the first aunt, pinching my chin. “She's a moon.”

I hid my face in my hands, squirming under so many extravagant compliments, and both aunts laughed.

“Go dance!” said the second. “Omar will think badly of us if we don't teach you how to dance.”

I got up and let one of the littlest cousins tie a bell-covered scarf around my hips, feeling lucky to be alive at this moment among these people. It was such a tantalizing contradiction, being a woman in the Middle East—far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated. When people wonder why Arab women defend their culture, they focus on the way women who don't follow the rules are punished, and fail to consider the way women who do follow the rules are rewarded. When I finished an article or essay, all I received was an e-mail from an editor saying, “Thanks, got it.” When I cooked an
iftar
meal during Ramadan, a dozen tender voices blessed my hands.

“Why aren't women allowed to lead men in prayer?” I asked Omar one day as he sat on the couch reading Ibn Arabi. He closed the book over his index finger to keep his place and slid over to make room for me. I felt a surge of affection; he never dismissed or belittled my questions, and when I asked them, they took precedence over whatever else he was doing.

“Women are the manifestation of God's beauty, which on Earth is veiled from men's eyes,” he said. “So to put women on display in front of men is unworthy.”

“That's a Sufi answer,” I said with a smile.

“I am a Sufi,” he said, smiling back at me. “But it's the truth.”

In recent weeks, I had gone looking for other Islams. By now I was comfortable enough in my own faith to be curious about different interpretations. Though I was a westerner and a Muslim, I wasn't quite a western Muslim; my religious ideas and practices were products of North Africa. Using the internet, I started to read about Islamic movements in the West, hoping for a clearer picture of Muslim life in my own culture. That was how I discovered the Progressives. They were a group of American Muslims dedicated to reform, bringing the practice of Islam into line with its original humanitarian vision. One of their main goals was gender equality in the mosque, the linchpin of which was a campaign to allow female imams to lead mixed-gender prayers.

As precedent, the Progressives cited the story of Umm Waraqah, a matriarch from the time of the Prophet Muhammad who was given permission to lead both men and women in prayer. However, with this exception, all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence held that women should only lead congregations of other women, not of women and men. The reasons why were a contradictory mishmash of man's earthly superiority and his sexual weakness; he was more fit to lead, yet he could be undone by the sight of a woman
bending over in front of him. Having no desire to lead congregational prayer myself, the issue had never bothered me, but the opposition to the Progressives' argument was so pathetic that I had to say something.

“What about Umm Waraqah?” I asked Omar. “They're saying she set a precedent for women leading men.”

Omar sighed. “Umm Waraqah was a very old woman when that decision was made,” he said. “And the story only says she led her
dar
—her own house. Younger men and boys, who were all related to her. It was a specific situation.”

“If she was only leading men in her house,” I said, pulling out the linchpin of the Progressives' argument, “why did the Prophet assign her a muezzin?” A muezzin is the person who gives the call to prayer—something you wouldn't need if the people gathering to pray lived in the same house. Traditionally, one muezzin serves an entire district.

Omar looked at me more closely. This kind of reasoning was somewhat alien to Islamic jurisprudence, which favored the inductive over the deductive.

“That,” he said, “is an interesting question.”

“Besides,” I continued, “
dar
doesn't always mean
house. Dar es-salaam
is Heaven, which is far more than a house. And
dar el-harb
is realm of war, not house of war.”

Omar drummed his fingers on the carved wooden arm of the couch. “Your Arabic is getting better. Sameh is a good teacher.” He looked like he was considering his next words. “I know there are things that are hard for you to understand,” he said, “but be a little careful about whose
authority you trust. Plenty of people talk without anything to say, and without understanding.”

“I know.” I squeezed his hand. “I'll be careful.”

Early that March, when the weather in Cairo was yellow with sandstorms, the Progressives in New York held a Friday prayer led by a female scholar, Dr. Amina Wadud. There was a chorus of praise from western observers and a mixture of bemusement and alarm from the Muslim world. Savvy by now from years of fallout over the Salman Rushdie death fatwa, many conservative leaders instructed their followers to leave the Progressives alone. “We know that the enemies of Islam have many tactics they use in trying to get a misdirected and emotional response out of the Muslims,” was the remark of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, a member of the Zaytuna Institute. “And perhaps they do that in order to produce a situation where they can justify taking action against those they label as extremists, radicals, terrorists, and fundamentalists. I think that if people want to make up their own religion, let them do as they like. We just ask them to give us a little respect.” It was an opinion repeated in orthodox circles across the globe, along with the surprisingly canny pronouncement that the prayer was a publicity stunt and would not result in any real change. Conservatives were getting smarter about media.

“Except for the usual trickle of sociopaths, it looks like this is going to be a pretty civil scandal,” I told Omar, reading over reactions as they came in, “I'm impressed.”

“Actually,” said Omar with a little smile, “I was going to tell you that the mufti was just on TV. He's supporting the prayer.”

I stared at him.

“He is? Is he still on? What did he say?”

“He didn't say that it's necessarily a good thing for women to lead prayer,” Omar explained, “because to let an unqualified woman lead prayer simply to make a statement about women leading prayer is wrong.”

“Right. Tokenism.”

“But he said it was a matter for debate—that there is no scholarly consensus that women should not lead prayer. He says it's for each congregation to decide for itself.”

It was by far the highest level of support the Progressives would get for their agenda. I spent the day glued to Arab news channels and MuslimWakeup!, the flagship Progressive Muslim Web site, waiting to see if there would be any more discussion of Gomaa's endorsement. I was shocked at what I saw.

“Why do we need approval from some guy in a beard on the other side of the world?” someone commented on the MWU! article about Gomaa.

“Who cares what the mullahs think?”

“I'm surprised that this is even posted here—these people are not our friends.”

“MWU! is publicizing the endorsement of a man who supports terrorism.”

I couldn't believe what I was reading. If this was progress, Islam was in trouble. Gomaa had never supported terrorism; I could only assume the anonymous commenter
thought all clerics in beards and turbans were violent. It was disturbing to see such suspicion and self-hatred. Gomaa had gone out on a limb—it was unlikely he would receive support for his ruling from the rest of the Sunni establishment, and if he didn't get it from the West, where he was undoubtedly expecting it, he might be forced into a retraction.

“They're out of their
minds,
” I said to Omar that evening. “They've been offered an olive branch from the traditionalists and they don't give a damn.”

“Why does it matter to you so much? You've never even met these people.”

I struggled with an answer. For so long there had seemed to be no overlap between my history and my religion—when I was in Egypt I had to translate my past, make it digestible and comprehensible and safe to other Muslims, and when I was in the United States I had to do the same thing to my beliefs. Here were people refusing to translate. They were westerners and Muslims in one fluid identity, and they felt no need to apologize or explain themselves. I didn't want to admit how burdened I felt by my conciliatory instincts. The contempt I felt for converts who turned their backs on their own people arose in part out of jealousy; I wished I could simply shrug people off as soon as loving them made my life difficult, as they did. It would be easier if I could simply choose one camp or the other. The Progressives allowed me to hope I wouldn't have to. That was why it gave me so much pain to see this opportunity slip away.

Sure enough, by the next morning Al-Azhar had issued a statement opposing the mufti's endorsement of the Wadud prayer—a highly unusual move in an organization that
usually took pains to present a unified front. Gomaa would spend the next year covering his right flank, catering to conservatives with a series of fatwas that baffled western observers. A great moment had passed by, mishandled on all sides.

When the people cast their votes
we can all go home and cut our throats.

—Irving Berlin, “The Honorable
Profession of the Fourth Estate”

I
N
2005,
UNDER PRESSURE FROM THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
, P
RESI
dent Mubarak called for an election. For the first time since he was thrust into power by the assassination of Anwar El Sadat, Mubarak allowed serious candidates from parties other than his own to run against him—a move that inspired the City Victorious to breathless political optimism and heavy rioting for many months. The Ikhwan al Muslimeen—known in the West as the Muslim Brotherhood—were still barred from politics, but ran dozens of parliamentary candidates as independents. In the presidential race, one serious contender emerged: Ayman Nour, a young progressive who formed a party he named Al Ghad, or Tomorrow. Nour's platform appealed to a wide cross section of Egyptians: he was religious enough to be popular with the young, but had political savvy that appealed to their socialist parents. He stressed freedom of speech, assembly and the press, and talked of new infrastructure; from the very beginning it was clear he was a doomed man. Nevertheless, his dedicated supporters demonstrated over and over again in
downtown neighborhoods, clashing with hired National Democratic Party thugs and rival parties. Cairo stepped out from its behind-the-scenes role as the site of negotiations and summits to become, for a short while, the center of international attention.

“Here's one from the board,” said Richard, the
Cairo Magazine
culture editor, at a meeting one evening in early April. “State media coverage of the political demonstrations that've been going on downtown.” He tapped the spot on the crowded assignment board where it was scribbled in. “As you've probably all noticed, there hasn't been much to speak of. This would mean talking to some of the higher-ups in the Egyptian Radio and Television Union about their election coverage policies. I'm not touching it. Who wants it?”

“I'll do it,” I said. “I wouldn't mind some excitement.”

“Good. Here.” Richard handed me a list of contacts. “Off you go.”

Several days later I found myself at the beginnings of a demonstration in Tahrir Square. Over a hundred black-clad riot police lined the traffic-choked space between the Egyptian Museum and the American University, acting as a human perimeter to contain the mayhem. State media outlets were claiming the protest was organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, and refused to cover the event on the grounds that the Ikhwan were an illegal party. The protest was so chaotic that it was difficult to make heads or tails of its ideology. It was not uncommon for women to be groped and molested at these demonstrations, so I stayed along the outer edge, away from the oppressive mass at the center of
the square. After half an hour I gave up: there was so much infighting that determining the original intent of the protest was impossible. I left and took the metro home, overheated and frustrated.

The Cairo metro is divided into two sections: mixed cars in which both men and women can travel, and the women's car, in which men are not allowed. In the women's car, which seemed to exist in a feminine vacuum untroubled by the turmoil in the streets above, I spotted a familiar heart-shaped face encircled by a head scarf: it was the daughter of my upstairs neighbor, a girl a year or two younger than I was. She waved and came over to give me a kiss.

“What are you doing here in the middle of the day?” she asked in Arabic.

I hesitated. It was rare that I covered something so controversial, and when I did I was discreet about sharing details with Omar's family and our friends. The prevalent opinion in the world we inhabited was that a woman did not, strictly speaking, have the right to put herself in potential social, political, or physical danger.

“Covering the protest,” I said finally, deciding the truth was simplest. My neighbor seemed unfazed. “I couldn't tell what was going on,” I continued, more confident now, “they're claiming it's an Ikhwan demonstration but it didn't look that way to me.”